Recommended reading

[Chris Messina]

Two stories worth a look:

* Relevance Over Time from TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/12/relevance-over-time/

* Why email no longer rules... from WSJ: http://j.mp/wsj_streams

Also, if you haven't seen my talk from Finland, you might find it interesting:

http://tr.im/fj_mindtrek

http://tr.im/fj_mindtrek_v

Feedback welcome!

Chris 

--
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate

Personal: http://factoryjoe.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/chrismessina

Citizen Agency: http://citizenagency.com
Diso Project: http://diso-project.org
OpenID Foundation: http://openid.net

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[Chris Messina]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 1:30 PM, Yishay Mor <yis...@gmail.com> wrote:

2009/10/12 Chris Messina <chris....@gmail.com>

* Why email no longer rules... from WSJ: http://j.mp/wsj_streams

I love twitter, will tolerate facebook, and have had a spin on pretty much every messaging system with more than 5 users, wiki comments, IRC, plaxo, IM, whatever. I'm getting a bit bored by every financial reporter that wants to prove he's hip discovering twitter and  telling me email is dead.

Sorry, dude, email rules. Try to find the FB message you send your lawyer with your response to last years' contract. Try to escalate the support request you tweeted to the technician's manager. 

Email gives me messages up to 10MB, archiving, search, lists, security, as well as mundane features such as spell checking and formatted text. Give me a call when FB / twitter ticks half of those.

Hmm. I'm not sure that that's exactly what the article is saying.

I think the point is that email no longer "works" with people's attention spans and the amount of interaction they desire.

While the *features* that you're describing certainly aren't present in more of the stream-based systems, I think you're talking about the benefits of archiving and searching over a corpus of data, rather than the way in which it's delivered in real-time.

There's no reason why you can't add all those features to Twitter, Facebook or other social networks... but the question is: do you really want to replicate the foibles of email everywhere there's social functionality?

To quote Zawinski's Law:  “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

I think this is becoming less accurate because the nature of the web is moving from asynchronrous document transmission to real-time messaging and conversation.

Perhaps the new law will be more like: “Every program attempts to expand until it tweet. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

(where tweet could also be replaced by "share")

[Luca Mearelli]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Chris Messina <chris....@gmail.com> wrote:
> While the *features* that you're describing certainly aren't present in more
> of the stream-based systems, I think you're talking about the benefits of
> archiving and searching over a corpus of data, rather than the way in which
> it's delivered in real-time.

yep, lately I got the feeling that while we are moving our
interactions more and more into the "real-time" territory, we are
still seeing just its border, we exchange and interact with just the
basic building blocks, often in insulated silos, while there may be
actual benefits in the storing, aggregating and filtering of these
basic atoms of information.

> There's no reason why you can't add all those features to Twitter, Facebook
> or other social networks... but the question is: do you really want to
> replicate the foibles of email everywhere there's social functionality?

agreed, but when the tools will emerge that enable taking our personal
cloud of social activity and see (and use) it in new ways, we'll
hopefully be able to do so in a much more useful way and with a finer
grained capability to control it...

Luca

[Stephen Paul Weber]

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Somebody claiming to be Yishay Mor wrote:
> 2009/10/12 Chris Messina <chris....@gmail.com>
>

> > * Why email no longer rules... from WSJ: http://j.mp/wsj_streams
> >
> >

> I love twitter, will tolerate facebook, and have had a spin on pretty much
> every messaging system with more than 5 users, wiki comments, IRC, plaxo,
> IM, whatever. I'm getting a bit bored by every financial reporter that wants
> to prove he's hip discovering twitter and telling me email is dead.

Email is certainly not dead: we just have a lot of other tools now :)
I'll take an email over 10 twitter DMs any day, but I'll take a single
@reply tweet over a one-line email :)

- --
Stephen Paul Weber, @singpolyma
See <http://singpolyma.net> for how I prefer to be contacted
edition right joseph
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[Stephen Paul Weber]

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Somebody claiming to be Yishay Mor wrote:

> 2009/10/13 Stephen Paul Weber <singp...@singpolyma.net>

> > Email is certainly not dead: we just have a lot of other tools now :)
> > I'll take an email over 10 twitter DMs any day, but I'll take a single
> > @reply tweet over a one-line email :)
> >
> >

> Which I did. Now my followers are saying "WTF?" and readers of this list
> don't know what I said.
> So, any ideas how we preserve context when jumping channels?

Unless you're 1:1 or with a rather small group, jumping channels is probably
never going to be a good idea. You can call someone about a letter, but you
can't call a circular.

- --
Stephen Paul Weber, @singpolyma
See <http://singpolyma.net> for how I prefer to be contacted
edition right joseph
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[Steve Ivy]

I don't think jumping channels is a problem, but, as Stephen points
out, jumping *scopes* is. Jumping from 1:1 in email to 1:1 twitter is
(to the user) pretty easy to follow. Jumping from a 1:* mailing list
to 1:1 twitter and back creates a real gap in information flow. This
is not specific to activity streams - you see this all the time with
off-list email replies that get brought back on-list.

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Stephen Paul Weber
<singp...@singpolyma.net> wrote:
>> Which I did. Now my followers are saying "WTF?" and readers of this list
>> don't know what I said.
>> So, any ideas how we preserve context when jumping channels?
>
> Unless you're 1:1 or with a rather small group, jumping channels is probably
> never going to be a good idea.  You can call someone about a letter, but you
> can't call a circular.
>

--
Steve Ivy
http://redmonk.net // http://diso-project.org
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